Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“I hope Annie doesn’t have unreasonable expectations.”

“You patched up your little tiff, didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” Jacob said. “It’s just, I don’t want her to be disappointed.”

“When the geographic cure doesn’t take.”

“Something like that.”

“I think she knows it’s just a weekend,” Carl said. “Anyway, it’s supposed to be scenic.”

“Auschwitz?”

“Renowned for the charm of its architecture. I thought we weren’t going there.”

“I don’t know. Annie really wants to.”

They had agreed to meet her at the central post office on , a block from Wenceslas Square, where Annie wanted to check the poste restante once more before they left town. The building, a late Hapsburg monument, stolid and practical, sat close to the street, and its entrance was so narrow and so heavily trafficked that it was only after entering that one arrived at a sense of it. As in a fairy tale, the cavernous central hall, once one stood inside, seemed larger than the palace that contained it. Strangers who had walked in at one’s side fell away; the echoing marble floor emptied. Street lamps lit the hall with yellow rays that cut into blue shadows, flattening what they exposed, reversing day for night as well as inside for outside. And far above, in obscurity, hung a dead skylight, whose dust-colored panes had been boarded over on the outside, no doubt long ago. Indented from the far wall, a wooden frame rose a few yards into the air. It held the service windows. It left undivided the bulk of the dim, unlit volume above, the way a rood screen, pointing upward, leaves the core of a cathedral intact. The room was too large to heat, and Jacob and Carl found Annie, tiny at the foot of a wall, blowing into the fingers of her knitted gloves.

“If it’s any trouble, I can come back Friday week, I don’t mind,” Annie offered. “It’s just that come the end of the month, they move the old letters into a cabinet, and I haven’t stopped in for weeks now. It’s miserable to have to ask the paní there to check the cabinet. She has a sigh that stops your heart.”

“We’ll all check, then,” Carl suggested.

They waited together, silenced and made nervous by the hall’s artificial dusk. To their surprise, both Carl and Annie had letters waiting. Annie’s was from Berlin. She said she would read it later, in the car, because it was bound to be bad news. “Anyone with good news would know to write me at the .”

Carl’s was from Boston. “Oh, this woman I went on a few dates with.”

“You haven’t mentioned her before,” said Jacob. He felt jealous of Carl for having a social world in America to go back to. In recent letters, his own friends had let him know that they were scattering. Daniel was reported to have taken a job as an editor in Washington.

“No, well.”

“You sound quite Czech when you say that,” Annie commented.

“No jo,” Carl clowned. The Czech phrase was a melancholy way of admitting to something.

They rode the subway north to Holešovice, a neighborhood of soot-stained brick workers’ residences from the late nineteenth century, coarse and unremarkable. They walked the perimeter of the neighborhood’s train station, where new tricolor billboards amalgamated the flags of Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Great Britain in order to suggest that expatriates gambled in a nearby casino. There were also several signs for massage parlors. The rental-car agency was in the corner of a bus station behind the train station; it borrowed parking space that the buses didn’t use. A young woman and a young man, who seemed to be sister and brother, checked a car out to them. Unexpectedly, the paperwork was brief.

“My god, they trust us,” Carl crowed, as soon as they were inside the car, a white compact Škoda with black seats.

Annie excitedly hushed him.

“Did we even give them a credit card?”

“They have the numbers of our long-stay visas,” Annie said. “And the address of Jacob’s and my employer.”

“But this car is worth, what, as much as the two of you would make in five years? And there’s no collateral. They gave us the collateral.”

“We’re driving capital,” Jacob said. He was taking the first turn behind the wheel. He started the ignition and eased it into the street. “In order to jump-start capitalism, they have to give the capital away.”

“For goodness’ sake it’s a Škoda,” Annie said. She waved responsibly through the near windshield to the brother and sister. “Na shledanou!” she said brightly but no doubt too quietly for the proprietors to hear through the glass and the now-growing distance.

“What if we sell it?” Carl asked.

“We will do no such thing,” said Annie.

“But we’re going to Poland. ”

“Perhaps we shall sell it, then, if you’re so keen. For blue jeans and what not.”

“Excellent.”

Prague’s one-way streets soon turned the friends around, and they had to pull over and consult their maps. Jacob had brought two: a large green one of Czechoslovakia’s countryside, and a large orange-and-purple one of Poland’s. Across his lap, Carl unfolded them, as well as Jacob’s blue city map, which from long wear in Jacob’s back pocket was now softly disintegrating into tall strips. By comparison of the unwieldy, loud-wrinkling layers, they plotted a course. With Carl navigating, they crossed a bridge, drove down the hill where Jacob and Annie’s language school stood, and then turned east, along the tram tracks that Jacob and Carl rode home every evening. They passed the hospital Jacob had visited. Half a block from the Stehlíks’, they reached the highway, and in a few minutes, the last panelák was behind them and abruptly they were among cultivated fields, methodically furrowed and just beginning to sprout pale green.

Jacob cracked his window. Annie, in the back seat, took out her letter, and Carl, without saying anything, took out his. They were getting away with driving a car to Krakow, unwatched, unregulated. Jacob had the company of Carl and Annie, his ironic friend and his earnest one, and the three of them had the solidarity of their mistreatment by the god of love. The highway was for the most part empty; between villages it was so empty that they might have been the last people still living in the world. The only challenge was not to drive so fast that the curves became unsafe; there was no one to hit or be hit by. Maybe he wanted nothing more than to be away for a little while from the burden of living in another country, to return to the insouciance of merely visiting, of mere tourism; maybe he wanted to slip away for a while from the inchoate duty he had set himself of finding the spirit of change, if that was indeed the name of the spirit he was pursuing.

A few hours outside Prague, the three climbed into a massive concrete hammer and sickle that they found beside the highway, a memorial to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Hitler, and Carl took snapshots. When they took a wrong turn near the border, they were frightened by a smoggy valley, where fire spouted from black chimneys and long milky puddles lay like mirrors in a landscape of pale, clean-looking clay, free of life.

* * *

A few days later, in Krakow’s main square, the afternoon was mild and Jacob offered to pay the cover at an outdoor café. He owed his friends a treat for the day before. He had started off well at Auschwitz, but at Birkenau he hadn’t been willing to get out of the car.